Kenneth E Hendrickson III, Ph.D.

Professor and Dean of Graduate Studies

Education

PhD, History, Univ. of Iowa, 1993

MA, History, Texas A&M Univ., 1988

BA, History, Texas A&M Univ., 1987

Biography

Hendrickson has been on faculty at Sam Houston State University since 1994. His earliest interests revolved around popular religion and Victorian-era British society, especially at the intersection of religious fervor and the Empire. Continued explorations of Anglicanism at the popular level led him into the study of Darwinism: its emergence and reception in the era prior to the First World War. Darwinian consciousness, the conviction that all life on Earth is related by common ancestry and common evolutionary pressures, has in the last 150 years made possible a nascent biophilic revolution: the reconnection of western humanism with biological imperatives that subvert Reformation and Enlightenment ideas about “human nature”, “natural law”, and the place of humanity in the overall scheme of life on Earth. This connection has led Hendrickson to look again at the Industrial Revolution in Britain and elsewhere with the goal of rethinking the traditional narrative elements about human progress. Since 2013, Hendrickson has also worked as university administrator.

Courses

Undergraduate:

Britain to 1688

Britain Since 1688

British Empire

History of Science and Medicine

World History

U.S. History Survey

Graduate:

British Empire

Darwin and Victorian Society

Selected Publications

The Encyclopedia of the Industrial Revolution in World History, 3 vols. Rowman & Littlefield: New York, 2014. Editor.

A Historical Dictionary of the Darwin Controversies. Athens: 2005. With Glenn Sanford.

Making Saints: Religion and the Popular Image of the British Army at Home, 1809-1885. Madison, New Jersey: 1998.

“The Second Texas Revolution: from Cotton to Genetics and the Information Age” in John Storey and Mary Kelley, eds., Twentieth Century Texas: a Social and Cultural History. UNT Press: Denton, Texas, 2008. With Glenn Sanford.